of the volume, and at another the name of the biographer;--"Turn to
your Rawley! HE will set you right;" or, "THERE you will find a
depth which no research will ever exhaust;" or whatever other strong
expression my sense of Bacon's greatness and of the intrinsic worth
and the value of the proofs and specimens of that greatness,
contained and preserved in that volume, would excite and justify.
But let my expressions be as vivid and unqualified as the most
sanguine temperament ever inspired, would any man of sense conclude
from them that I meant--and meant to make others believe--that not
only each and all of these anecdotes, adages, decisions, extracts,
incidents, had been dictated, word by word, by Lord Bacon; and that
all Rawley's own observations and inferences, all the connectives and
disjunctives, all the recollections of time, place, and circumstance,
together with the order and succession of the narrative, were in like
manner dictated and revised by the spirit of the deceased Chancellor?
The answer will be--must be--No man in his senses! "No man in his
senses--in THIS instance; but in that of the Bible it is quite
otherwise; for (I take it as an admitted point that) it IS quite
otherwise!"

And here I renounce any advantage I might obtain for my argument by
restricting the application of our Lord's and the Apostle's words to
the Hebrew Canon. I admit the justice--I have long felt the full
force--of the remark--"We have all that the occasion allowed." And
if the same awful authority does not apply so directly to the
Evangelical and Apostolical writings as to the Hebrew Canon, yet the
analogy of faith justifies the transfer. If the doctrine be less
decisively Scriptural in its application to the New Testament or the
Christian Canon, the temptation to doubt it is likewise less. So at
least we are led to infer; since in point of fact it is the apparent